A Dance at Midnight

The sky was a powdery cobalt. Cirrus clouds stretched across the dark blue expanse like downy feathers. Fireflies lit up the garden. Somewhere, a bush emitted a briny aroma, mingling with the honeyed scents of the flowers.

The pavilion fit all fifty of them inside with room left over. Like the rest, Adrian sat on a silk cushion in front of a low wooden table. Atop the table was a shard of diamond, its facets glittering like a thousand tiny mirrors, and a large carafe, also crafted from pure diamond, filled with fresh blood.

“The pairs have been randomly assigned,” Senar said. She sat at the head of their congregation. Her ebony hair was pulled back in a sleek updo, and layers of pale pink chiffon covered her skin. Her back was straight, her shoulders were loose, and a faint smile curved her lips as she peered at each of them.

The sixth night, the last night before the Bleeding Ball, was when the vampires fed each other blood; it was a way of coming together as one in order to acknowledge and honor the plight of vampires who had had, and may still have, no one else.

“Each diamond has been carved with the name of the person you will feed with,” Senar continued. “Once you find your partner, please feel free to either stay or go to your rooms.” She lifted her diamond.

Adrian lifted his as well. On the base of the rock was a single word etched in calligraphy: Senar. He looked up and tried to catch her eye, but she wasn’t looking at him. He followed her gaze: Heather, who had been matched with Solomon, was arching her back as her partner licked the droplets of blood off her bare sternum. Heather giggled and sighed in pleasure.

Around them, others followed suit, and soon, the pavilion reeked of blood, even more so than before.

A line appeared between Senar’s brows; her lips had thinned, and something told Adrian that she had fisted her hands in the folds of her gown. Setting down the diamond, he stood up and strode over to her.

A moment passed before she looked up at him. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking, and he didn’t try to. He offered his palm. “Shall we?” he asked.

The last time he had done this, she had flipped him on his back. She had ample reason to do the same thing this time. She didn’t: she grabbed his hand, her palm cool, and he gently pulled her to her feet. She nodded at him. “You know the way.”

Out on the balcony, they stood, side by side but not quite touching. Above them, the stars shimmered. The sound of crickets singing drifted up.

“The stars are bright tonight,” Adrian said.

“They are,” Senar said.

“Celeste once told me that all those stars up there are the spirits of those who’ve passed,” he said. “Bullshit, obviously. I don’t want to look up at the sky and picture dead people staring down at me, watching my every move.”

“Do you miss her?” Senar asked.

“I don’t feel like I deserve to,” he said truthfully. “After what I did to her. But yes. Always.”

“I understand,” she said. “I feel the same way about Jihwa.”

Adrian knew the story about Senar’s daughter, though the specifics varied depending on who told the tale. He had a feeling he was going to learn the truth now.

“She was eight when the men took her,” Senar said. “I hadn’t sensed them; I was so drunk with blood, I might as well have been living in a different world. They took her, and they tortured her. They tortured Hajoon, my husband at the time, too. When I found her...”

He waited patiently.

“When I found her, she was nearly dead. They had kept her alive, just barely, as another form of torture. She was in so much pain that I,” she stopped, straightened herself, “I killed her.”

Adrian thought of Celeste. She hadn’t been in pain, and he’d still managed to kill her.

“She was in pain,” he said. Senar had killed her own daughter out of mercy, as she should’ve done. He wasn’t a father, had never been a father, but to lose someone near and dear to you because of your own actions...well, he could relate to that.

She looked at him now, and her eyes held an intensity he hadn’t seen before. “I murdered my own daughter,” she said.

He wiped the wetness on her cheeks with his thumb. “It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “None of it. Not your turning into a vampire, not the men taking her, not Jihwa being in so much pain that you had to end it for her. Which you had to do.”

“Ever since that night, I vowed to drink only as much as I needed to survive. And then,” she let out a strangled laugh, “I got bloodwoken.”

“That’s not your fault either, darling,” he said. He didn’t know what it was like to be bloodwoken, and he hoped to hell he never got to find out. Dealing with bloodwake had to be close to impossible; compassion suddenly rose up inside him for Senar.

So far, Adrian had done what he’d done to protect his secret, and by doing so protected hers as well. He’d been alone for so long that he’d always acted in his best interests. Now, he couldn’t help but wonder if there was a small part of him that had done what he’d done because he wanted to protect her.

“No,” Senar said, “I suppose not. On one hand, I take it as my punishment, for what I’d let happen to Hajoon and Jihwa. On the other hand, being sick isn’t...that terrible.” To herself, she muttered, “I can’t believe I just said that.”

“How so?”

“I can enjoy the sunshine again,” she said. “I can eat food again. Real, human food. I didn’t realize just how much I’d missed it until I had it again.”

Adrian made a non-committal sound.

“I’m serious! Blood is disgusting when you’ve tasted chocolate chip cookies straight out of the oven.”

“Cookies over blood? You really are a monster, aren’t you?” As soon as the words left his mouth, he wished he hadn’t said them.

But Senar didn’t look offended. She said, “For cookies? I’d be nothing less.”

He chuckled softly. “I do miss the sun,” he said. The sky had grown black now. Always black. The only times he got to enjoy a different color of the sky was right before dawnbreak, but it wasn’t enough.

“I’ll take pictures next time,” she said.

“I didn’t know you had a phone.”

“With a camera,” she responded in a way that told him he’d just said the dumbest thing. “You have a phone?”

“It’s the twenty-first century, baby,” he said.

“And you know how to use it?”

“Psh, yeah. Maybe.” He hesitated. “Not really, but no one else needs to know that.”

“Careful,” she said, “or else you’re going to run out of secrets to tell.”

“Good thing you’re the only one I trust to tell them to.”

She blinked. Adrian fought back a smile. He rested his forearms on the railing; the cold of the metal seeped through the sleeves of his shirt. “Is it my turn yet?” he asked.

“Your turn?”

“My sob story.”

“I didn’t know The Bleeder had a sob story.”

He winked at her. “All the greats do.”

She rolled her eyes. “Let’s hear it.”

“She went by The Red Ghost,” he began. “She kidnapped me and brought me to her underground den. She never got a handle on her thirst, and she was rough with us. Even now, I’m surprised that I’d lasted as long as I had.

“Anyway, one night, she drank from me until I became unconscious, and when I woke up, I was a vampire. I killed her immediately after. As for the rest, I drained them dry. It’s ironic: I had been human alongside them just the night before, but from the moment I realized I’d become a vampire, I promised myself that I would never be weak like them again.”

“That’s why you became The Bleeder,” Senar said.

“Yes,” he said, “and no. Really, I’m just a greedy bastard.”

She laughed at that. He soaked in the sound and the way the corners of her eyes crinkled and a dimple pressed into the side of her left cheek. He had never noticed it before.

Instantly, it was as if the air had shrunk between them. He only smelled her, bergamot and osmanthus, and he only saw her, her doe eyes, her pert nose, and her parted lips. He heard her heart, how fast it beat. If his heart still beat, and if he allowed himself to imagine, he reckoned his would be thumping, too.

She looked away first, but not before tucking a strand of hair that had fallen out of her braided bun behind her ear.

Comfortable silence enveloped them. Giggling and light chatter adorned the silence. Perfumes, pheromones, and blood scents were thick in the air, but Adrian was able to smell everything else underneath them: the lilac blooms, the trimmed lawn, the moist earth through which an earthworm wriggled through.

He could also sense the sudden tension coiling off Senar’s shoulders. “What is it?” he asked.

“Master Dane knows about me.”

He thought he was hearing things but remembered he never did. His stomach dropped, and he snapped his head toward Senar who stared straight ahead. “How?”

She rolled up a sleeve and stuck out her arm for him to see. The wound was no more than a nick, but it was enough.

“Fuck,” he said. The image of her broken skin, of her bleeding, made red swarm his vision. Not only that but also the fact that Dane knew. If Dane knew, everyone knew.

He punched the railing; the metal split from the force of his blow at the same time a yell tore out of his throat. “I’m going to kill him,” he said. Dane was an old man, Adrian could easily take him down.

He wanted to take him down.

Adrian was about to leap off the balcony when Senar placed her hand on his. He looked down. Her warmth bled into his cold. “Senar, let go,” he said with gritted teeth.

“Tomorrow,” she said.

We’ll end up getting killed before then, he thought but didn’t say.

“We need to be rational about this,” she said.

"He is not going to be rational about this.”

“I know. But, if he’s smart, he’ll wait until tomorrow, too.”

A whiff in the air told Adrian that nobody, not Dane or Solomon or Heather, was near. Still, he gripped the railing with white knuckles. This decision - to not act right now - could literally kill them. At the same time, Senar was right: if Dane were smart, he would wait until tomorrow to attack when everyone else was also present.

He’s going to herd us like prey.

“Please,” Senar said. A note of despair had crept into her voice.

Then again, Adrian could just finish Dane off now. Finish them all off while they were distracted. Adrian could do it. He’d done it before.

Think of Senar, his inner voice whispered. Don’t turn her into another Celeste.

He cursed. Loudly. Pain shot through his jaw, so hard he was clenching it. Adrian peered into the room, through the French doors. “Let’s go inside,” he said.

She went in first, and he followed, closing and locking the French doors firmly behind them. Inside, the flames from the candles cast ghoulish shadows along the walls. Faint vanilla and sandalwood scented the space.

He was still wound up, so he remained standing. “We need a plan,” he said.

“Humans,” Senar said.

“Donatori?”

“Not donatori,” she said. “For the ball tomorrow, we brought in fifty humans. We could put something in their blood. Enough to affect the vampires.”

“Won’t that affect the humans? Won’t the vampires notice that it’s affected the humans?”

She walked over to her vanity. She opened a small drawer and retrieved a slip of paper. “I had a hematopathologist; he’d been trying to find a cure for me. He’s retired now, but he gave me the number of another one.”

Adrian crossed over to Senar and took the paper from her. On it was a human’s name, a phone number, and the location of a hospital. He knew this hospital: it was only a twenty-minute drive away.

“We have to see him,” he said.

“It’s night now, they’re sleeping,” she said.

“Fucking hell, can’t humans sleep less? Why are they so weak?”

She snorted. “I’ll go tomorrow. You can hold down the fort here,” she said. “Figure out what everyone knows, and how much everyone knows.”

He didn’t love this plan because it would leave both of them vulnerable, but they didn’t have a better one. They had to risk it. “Where are the humans?”

“At my other house.”

“Where is that?”

“Ten minutes away.”

“You have two houses here?”

“You don’t?”

Huh. “Alright, you’ll meet with the doctor and get what you need from him. Meanwhile, I’ll scope out here. Afterward, we’ll give whatever you got to the humans before the ball and before the others wake up.” A second later, he said, “This is a shit plan.”

“I know.”

“We’ll probably die.”

“I know.”

“I’m not ready to die.”

“Then, don’t.”

He grinned. She returned his smile. The sight alone made him pause not for the first time. “You’re beautiful,” he thought aloud.

“We’ve known each other for over two hundred years now. When are you ever going to tell me something I don’t already know?”

Senar had first uttered those words to him that first night, which felt like ages ago now. He leaned in. “I mean it,” he said, his voice low, “and I don’t think you know that.”

That made her pause. He snickered in victory. He straightened and settled onto the low sofa; he clasped his hands behind his head. “What do you think this new doc will have for us?”

She settled onto her chaise, tucking her long legs underneath her body. His eyes lingered on her figure draped by the delicate chiffon. “Hopefully something that mimics real human blood but is potent enough to change a vampire’s chemistry.”

He focused. “Does such a thing even exist?”

“You’d be surprised by the different kinds of blood Dr. Morrow has created for me over the years.”

“Oh, yeah? What kinds?”

“Well, there was one that gave me a horrible headache...”

They talked through the night.